Tag: Men and Masculinity

‘Many kindred topics’: exploring the potential of the Victorian underground

Other, Published in JVC

In 1873, American writer and explorer Thomas Wallace Knox published Underground: Or, Life Below the Surface. Weighing in at a hefty 953 pages and drawing on the author’s own personal experience as well as ‘numerous books of travel’, ‘literary gentlemen’, and fictional and scientific sources, it offered an apparently exhaustive examination of every underground space at that point known to mankind: mines, riverbeds, vaults, caves, and many more.[1] Indeed, its subtitle was almost as long as the winding, subterranean labyrinths

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Sophie Cooper, ‘Oh woman! woman! Who can resist thy influence’: Male personal writings on romance in mid-nineteenth century Chicago

Published in JVC

Sophie Cooper is a third year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page If E___ be really a living thing of a warm heart – all elevated sentiments & deep womanly passions – not a

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Victorian Movember: The Return of the Monarch Beard.

Other

Charlotte Conway As Movember draws to a close social networking sites are filled with images of men proudly displaying their Franz Josef, Napoleon III and Kaiser Wilhelm inspired facial hair. It therefore seems apt to reflect upon the latter part of the nineteenth century when these individuals were at the cutting edge of fashionable hirsuteness; a time when wearing facial hair was worn by virtually every man, irrespective of social class; and a time when to be clean shaven became

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Merrick Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines & Allan Quatermain’

Other

By Merrick Burrow (University of Huddersfield) This post accompanies Merrick Burrow’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines ends with a letter in which Sir Henry Curtis, one of the main protagonists, highlights the significance of hunting and battle trophies brought back from the ‘lost world’ of Kukuanaland for his renewed sense of his own hegemonic masculinity: The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva

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Review: Ian Hislop’s ‘Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Jennifer Wallis (QMUL) Figure One: Ian Hislop and his many hats! Ian Hislop’s three-part series Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain aims to ‘[explore] emotion and identity over the last 300 years’ – or more pertinently, how (and indeed, if) we British have attempted to tame, bottle up, and alter our emotions. Screening the history of emotions may not be as straightforward as the history of surgery or of World War One, but Stiff Upper Lip is a

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